Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His short story “Sugarcane” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella How to Shake the Other Man was published by Nouvella Books. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI, is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, and serves as a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.
A New York Times Best Book of 2016
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Extraordinary. . . . A powerful story. . . . Palacio unspools his
characters’ lives with the type of omniscient authority befitting
an epic. . . . The narrative may operate on a grand scale, but
Palacio is just as gifted a miniaturist, able to distill the
unbearable ruptures in a family down to a single image.” —Dinaw
Mengestu, The New York Times Book Review
“Some books are storms. Others are weather. Derek Palacio's debut
novel, The Mortifications, is very much the latter. It is hot
sun and cool rain, morning fog and the hum of a fan in the window.
It ranges and roams, this book. When it settles onto a moment, it
does so with the weight of ten butterflies.” —NPR
“The Mortifications is fascinated with bodies—especially the
physical manifestations of emotions. . . . The novel doesn’t seem
to want to sublimate the ugly, the putrid, or the decayed; it’s
aware that describing abject bodily realities, in fiction, can in a
sense turn them into obejcts of beauty.” —Bookforum
"Palacio writes vividly, conjuring smells and tastes of life both
in the frozen north and the tropical Caribbean, from the sweat of a
nun, for whom expensive soap might prompt ‘inclinations toward
vanity’ to the flavor of tobacco and tomatoes." —The Boston
Globe
“A sweeping, lyrical tale of a family’s undoing. . . . Palacio’s
prose contains moments of beauty and magic that are a pleasure to
the ear.” —Dallas Morning News
“A powerful family saga.... Gorgeous and challenging.... Palacio’s
writing is deceptively simple and startlingly original, and his
characters, raw, almost mythic in scope, hang on long after the
last page. Searching, heartbreaking, and achingly beautiful, the
novel is as intimate as it is sweeping.”
—Kirkus, starred review
"A revelatory tale of Cuba and America, of faith and family, of the
spirit and the flesh, The Mortifications is a debut remarkable for
its wise and scrupulous insight into the human heart. Palacio
feelingly reminds us that all immigrants are also exiles, wounded
with loss, striving to make a home even as they yearn for the one
they've left behind." —Peter Ho Davies
"Derek Palacio may well be one of the best narrators to come out of
the Americas since Gabriel García Márquez. Like One Hundred
Years of Solitude, The Mortifications is a family saga
that combines the uncanny with astute and accurate depictions of
reality." —The Washington Independent Review of Books
"The Mortifications is a sweeping, moving story of a family in a
permanent state of longing. Shimmering in its immediacy and
wisdom, this is a novel about how the desire for lost home and
family can grow wild over a life in ways that are both beautiful
and devastating. Derek Palacio is a gift of a writer."
—Ramona Ausubel
“A novel of stunning sweep and vision. The story of the Encarnación
family plunges the reader into the dislocating heartache of life in
exile, in the intermediary land between the home that has been
forsaken and the one that might, in the future, await. Derek
Palacio’s prose is so assured it’s hard to believe The
Mortifications is his first novel—but it is, miraculously, and it
is one magnificent debut.” —Laura van den Berg
“The Mortifications, Derek Palacio's gorgeous debut novel about
Cuba and its people—those who left, those who can never leave—will
tear through your heart, and at the center of this swirling,
magical story are the Encarnacións, a family full of enough
dysfunction, heartache, love, loss, magic, urgent need, sensuality,
and sexuality to make you long for your own family of heartbreaking
and heartbroken misfits.” —Manuel Gonzales
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